Platonic intuition which reduces all sin to terms of ignorance I cannot accept the former explanation.  What is certain is that there was no lack of contemporary protest.  There existed in Dublin in 1828 a Society for the Improvement of Ireland, an active body which included in its membership the Lord Mayor (a high Tory, of course), Lord Cloncurry, and a long list of notable names such as Latouche, Sinclair, Houghton, Leader, Grattan, Smith O’Brien, George Moore, and Daniel O’Connell.  In the year mentioned the Society appointed a number of committees to report on the state of Irish agriculture, commerce, and industry.  One of these reports is full of information touching the drain of capital from the country, and its consequent decay, as registered by contemporaries; we shall learn from another how things stood with regard to coal.  At the time of the Union the Irish Parliament granted a bounty of 2s. per ton on Irish coal carried coastwise to Dublin, and levied a duty of 10-1/2d. per ton on coal imported from Great Britain.  The effect of the Union was to abolish the bounty and double the levy on imports.  Writing twenty-eight years later the Committee summarise in a brief passage the disastrous effects of a policy, so foolish and so unjust.  The last sentence opens up sombre vistas to any student of economic history: 

“Severe, however, as the operation of the coal duty in arresting the progress of manufacture may have been in other parts of Ireland, in Dublin, under the circumstances to which your Committee are about to call the attention of the Society, it has produced all the effects of actual prohibition, all the mischiefs of the most rigorous exclusion.  It is a singular circumstance that, in the metropolis of the country, possessing local advantages in respect to manufactures and facilities for trade with the interior, superior, probably, to any other city or town in this portion of the empire, with a population excessive as to the means of employment, in a degree which probably has not a parallel in Europe, there is not a factory for the production of either silk, linen, cotton, or woollen manufactures which is worked or propelled by a steam engine.”

The writers go on to ask for the repeal of the local duty on coal in Dublin, and to suggest that the necessary revenue should be raised by a duty on spirits.  This course Belfast had been permitted to follow—­one of the numberless make-weights thrown into the scale so steadily on the side of the Protestant North.  In my part of the country the people used to say of any very expert thief:  “Why, he’d steal the fire out of your grate.”  Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland.  And having so dealt with capital and coal the predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle transportation.

The Drummond Commission, appointed in 1836 to consider the question of railway construction in Ireland, issued a report in 1838 which practically recommended public and not private enterprise as appropriate “to accomplish so important a national object.”  What came after is best related in the official terminology of the Scotter Commission of 1906-10: